Commentary on Political Economy

Sunday, 11 November 2012

POSTCARD FROM ATHENS - Nietzsche and Plato on Art and Science, or The Wille zur Macht between Logos and Poiesis

Owing to the gratifying response from our friends to this piece, I ought to premit that this is a very rough draft of the first part of Chapter 3 of our "Nietzschebuch". Those friends who are interested should check again in the next few days when we should have the second part of this chapter, and then ultimately the final part. I should invite friends respectfully to read this material carefully because it is from here that the entire foundations of our critique of "science" - and especially of "economic science" - will be constructed.

The
Wille zur Macht between Logos and Poiesis

That instinct towards the formation of
metaphors,

that fundamental
instinct of man, which we cannot

reason away for
one moment— for thereby we should

reason away man
himself—is in truth not defeated

nor even subdued
by the fact that out of its evaporated
products,

the ideas, a regular and rigid new

world [science] has been built as a stronghold for it. This

instinct seeks
for itself a new realm of action and

another
river-bed, and finds it in Mythos and
more

generally in Art. (UWL, 188)

The “instinct toward the
formation of metaphors” is a “fundamental
instinct of man” because it is impossible for “thought” to ec-sist, to take
place, to occur, without a re-presentation of its ob-ject – of that upon which
thought re-flects -, so that this re-presentation must be dif-ferent from that
ob-ject, no matter how much and how hard “thought” may wish “to imitate” its
ob-ject, which remains distinct in that it is in-dependent of the thought process
itself, from its “re-ality” that is “separate” though it may be (as we will
see) co-naturate with thought. In
other words, the “content” of thought, its object, is not generated by thought;
and yet it is impossible even to imagine an “object” that is independent of
thought. If we tried “to reason away for one moment” this “fundamental instinct of man”, then, “we should
reason away man himself”, because the one characteristic that distinguishes human
beings from other living beings is this ability, indeed necessity, to think by
way of meta-phors, by way of this doomed attempt to mimetise life and the world,
because thought is necessarily meta-phorical. And the attempt to achieve a
total id-entification or complete mimesis of thought and object is something whose
futility human beings are aware of
precisely by virtue of being able to attempt it – through Art and myth-making.

But if “the instinct toward the
formation of metaphors” is inseparable from the very activity of “thinking”, it
follows that thought itself is “a fundamental instinct of man”, something peculiar and unique to human beings and
whose origin Nietzsche was later to identify and describe more precisely as
“the ontogeny of thought” that is the human expression of “the instinct of
freedom” or “the will to power”. Impossible, therefore, is the attempt to
distinguish and separate the act of perception or intuition from the very act
of understanding or inter-preting that act of perception by means of meta-phors:
impossible to split the act of perception into the perceiving “subject” and the
perceived “object”.

…. [W]hence it
clearly follows that that artistic
formation of

metaphors, with which every sensation [Empfindung] in us begins,

already
presupposes those forms [!],

and is therefore
only consummated within them; only out of the

persistency [Verharren, sclerosis, hardening] of
these primal forms

the possibility
explains itself how afterwards - out of the metaphors

themselves – a structure of ideas could again be
compiled. For the

latter is an imitation [Nachahmung, mimickry] of the relations of time,

Art and mythology are for
Nietzsche the human awareness of the im-possibility of bridging this mimetic
gap between thought and its object. And this occurs despite the fact that all
human perception “begins” with the
act of pro-ducing meta-phors and in fact already pre-supposes those metaphorical forms! And yet the constant and
“persistent” [Ver-harren] process of
thinking in metaphors can inure human beings to rigidify and scleroticise
artistic metaphors and myths into a system of symbols and ideas that pretend to
order life and the world as if they could truth-fully
be id-entical with their objects, as if they could per-fect (that is, achieve
technically, by their “doing”) the mimesis, the id-entification of the logos (thought, word) with the world.
And this Semiology, this system of ideas and symbols that re-fer to life and
the world, “forgets” that each perception or intuition of life and the world is
unique: what remains instead is not the “truth” of ideas – their “adequation”
to the “thing”, what Nietzsche calls “the
adequate expression of an object in the subject” (p.184)– but rather the “activity” that seeks
to mimick and repeat this identification in-definitely, as in so-called
“scientific experiments” – forgetting that the very “conduct” of “scientific
experiments” ends up trans-forming the very “reality” that it means “to test”!
(Mach’s “thought-experiments” are the most extreme instance of this process of
subjection of the object by the subject through the formal abstraction of
“experiments” as if these could be repeated infinitely – which is something
resembling madness.)

Clear, therefore, is the
critique that Nietzsche moves against Plato’s Socratic condemnation of poiesis, of artistic and mythopoeic
activity, and his championing instead of philosophic-scientific or “rational”
thought – a condemnation reticently copied by Kant with his definition of
Reason as “thought subject to a rule” (and his warning about the “distraction”
of music to the philosopher). According to Plato, reason or logic are vastly
superior to art or poiesis because they proceed according to the principle of
non-contradiction (cf. Bertrand Russell, “Whatever is, is, and cannot both be
and not-be”) whereas the former “doings” or activities are at best a
“diversion” from the search for truth and at worst an inveigling mystification
of reality and therefore an obfuscation of the truth. For Nietzsche, instead,
it is the other way around: artistic activity is much more “mimetic” in its
imitation of life and the world in that it is far more intuitive than science
and its “handmaiden” (Hegel in the Phenomenology)
philosophy, because the latter are entirely “con-ventional” activities that
seek to replace human intuition with “a structure of ideas or concepts
[Begriffe]”, which then degenerate into a mere play on “logic” that “forgets”
the necessarily “intuitive” character of the original sensation-perception
[Empfindung, Bild]! Not only is life and the world not “logical”, not only is
logical mimesis not “truth-ful”, but logic in fact mystifies human intuition
more than poiesis because it substitutes a purely con-ventional semiotic
structure and symbolism for the immediate human intuitions of reality which it
then mistakes for “the essence of things”, for “the Truth” – something that is instead
purely metaphorical and can only ec-sist as such.

Paradoxically, it is the
“memory” of the experiment, of the “unique
and individual experience”, that induces humans into thinking that what
they remember is the same as what they are about to do. Were it not for memory,
which for Nietzsche is the human faculty that originates “the ontogeny of
thought” from instinct to intellect - were humans forgetful like animals, they
could never come to forget (Vergessen) the im-mediacy of their
perceptions, and therefore con-fuse their memory of their immediate perceptions
with “the primal form” [Urform], with
“the objects themselves”, with “the essence of things” [Wesen der Dinge]! - Which is and can only be by way of meta-phor,
of re-presentation, by way of mimesis
or “imitation” – which brings the Semiotic System of Science and Philosophy,
their Logos and Ratio-Ordo back to the fundamental reality of Artistic
Experience or Poiesis. Just as
artistic creation is an “activity”, a “bringing into being” through the
“imitation” of life and the world, so are Logic and Science also an “activity”,
because experimentation never “repeats” an event but rather “trans-forms” life
and the world just as much as artistic poiesis, despite the fact that the Logos
of philosophy and science pretends instead to re-produce the “truth” or
“essence” of “things”, of “the real world”!

Only by forgetting
that primitive world of metaphors,

only by the congelation and coagulation
[crystallization and sclerosis] of an

This symbolic exchange or
conceptual mediation has the obvious effect of “distancing” the individual from
the immediate “view” (Bild) or “intuition” (Anschauung, a Kantian term) of life
and the world so that the “im-mediacy” of that view, intuition or perception
grows more remote from its “original” as the amount, frequency and
“generality”of conceptual interaction grows greater. Once again, memory is a
faculty that paradoxically allows us to forget (!) the im-mediacy of
experience; whereas it is forgetfulness (in the Zweite Betrachtung) that enables just such im-mediacy. But this
greater “generality” that is allowed by memory and language, by “words and
ideas”, increases the “distance” of the symbolic exchange from the “identity”
and “uniqueness” of the original human intuition and perception, leaving a large
“space” or “chasm” between identity and non-identity that can easily turn
symbolic “exchange” into “symbolic manipulation” such that what seem to be
“true” identities are in fact the artificial pro-ducts of symbolic manipulation
in a double sense – an individual sense and a social sense. At the individual
level, human beings begin to filter
their “aesthetic” experiences through systems of symbols (concepts, ideas) that
make possible the “distancing” of human experience from its “object” so that
the two become con-fused. And at the
social level, a more general “anthropomorphism” is produced whereby human
beings subject their living activity to “conventional descriptions” of life and
the world whose main object is to preserve the existing relations of power in
civil society by mistaking its reproduction for “the objective reality” of life
and the world!

The disregarding [or the “forgetting” that human
memory

enables us to do] of the individual and real furnishes us

with the concept
[Begriff, the idea as more than
mere perception

or Bild, but
as “conscious thought”, as the deception of

“self-consciousness”
and “logical reflection”], as it likewise
also

gives us the form; whereas nature knows of no forms
and concepts,

and therefore knows no categories [Gattungen,
term used by Kant]

but only an x,
to us inaccessible and indefinable.

For our antithesis
of individual and categories is anthropomorphic

too and does not
come from the essence of things, although on

the other hand
we do not dare to say that it does not correspond to it; for that

2 comments:

I recently had similar thoughts after reading Kant's first Critique. He defines experience as an intuition placed under a concept and then considers "objects of possible experience" in relation to the concepts that limit them. I always wondered about intuitions of objects that weren't subsumed under concepts.

I'm glad that I discovered this fascinating blog. Keep up the good work.

Thanks for the kind and encouraging comment. Please look out for a 'revised' version of this entry and the rest of this chapter of the 'Nietzschebuch', which I should be able to post as early as Monday perhaps. The next post will also contain a brief discussion of Max Weber's approach to "scientific progress" which you may find interesting. Extracts of my 'Weberbuch' can be found on this blog by simply searching in the apposite facility on the front page.Cheers!